Caesar's Column eBook

And still the bombs drop and crash, and drop and crash;
and the barricades are furnaces of living fire.
The dead lie in heaps and layers in the invisible,
pernicious poison.

But, lo! the fire slackens; the bombs cease to fall;
only now and then a victim flies out of the houses,
cast into death. There is nothing left to shoot
at. The grand army of the Plutocracy is annihilated;
it is not.

“The Demons” moved slowly off. They
had earned their money. The Mamelukes of the
Air had turned the tables upon the Sultan. They
retired to their armory, doubtless to divide the fifty
millions equitably between them.

The mob stood still for a few minutes. They could
scarcely realize that they were at last masters of
the city. But quickly a full sense of all that
their tremendous victory signified dawned upon them.
The city lay prostrate, chained, waiting to be seized
upon.

CHAPTER XXXIII.

“THE OCEAN
OVERPEERS ITS LIST”

And then all avenues were open. And like a huge
flood, long damned up, turbulent, turbid, muddy, loaded
with wrecks and debris, the gigantic mass broke loose,
full of foam and terror, and flowed in every direction.
A foul and brutal and ravenous multitude it was, dark
with dust and sweat, armed with the weapons of civilization,
but possessing only the instincts of wild beasts.

At first they were under the control of some species
of discipline and moved toward the houses of the condemned,
of whom printed catalogues had been furnished the
officers. The shouts, the yells, the delight
were appalling.

Now and then some poor wretch, whose sole offense
was that he was well-dressed, would take fright and
start to run, and then, like hounds after a rabbit,
they would follow in full cry; and when he was caught
a hundred men would struggle to strike him, and he
would disappear in a vortex of arms, clubs and bayonets,
literally torn to pieces.

A sullen roar filled the air as this human cyclone
moved onward, leaving only wrecks behind it.
Now it pauses at a house. The captain consults
his catalogue. “This is it,” he cries;
and doors and windows give way before the thunderous
mob; and then the scenes are terrible. Men are
flung headlong, alive, out of the windows to the ravenous
wretches below; now a dead body comes whirling down;
then the terrified inhabitants fly to the roofs, and
are pursued from house to house and butchered in sight
of the delighted spectators. But when the condemned
man—­the head of the house—­is
at last found, hidden perhaps in some coal-hole or
cellar, and is brought up, black with dust, and wild
with terror, his clothes half torn from his back; and
he is thrust forth, out of door or window, into the
claws of the wild beasts, the very heavens ring with
acclamations of delight; and happy is the man who
can reach over his fellows and know that he has struck
the victim.